Lead generation involves generating interest or inquiry into products or services of a business. Businesses strive to generate more qualified leads, those with a higher probability of a desired outcome. A lead scoring rule is a convention that allows a marketer to define some activity or behavior and associate certain points with that activity or behavior for the purpose of assessing the quality of a lead. All the prospects that do such an activity or behavior (herein referred to as an “activity” for simplicity) will qualify under the lead scoring rule and will be given the number of points defined in the rule. The activities shown by prospects can be both explicit (event attendance, newsletter subscription, document download on a website) and implicit (number of visits to a website, types of pages viewed, etc.). For example, a lead scoring rule created by a marketer may assign 7 points to all the prospects who attended a Trade show event.
Every lead will be assigned scores based on the activities of that lead. These scores can be averaged, added, or otherwise combined into an overall score for the lead that is used to assess or categorize the lead. In one example, leads are categorized as “hot,” “warm,” or “cold” based on each lead's overall score. Hot Leads are the people who are most interested in the marketer's product or service and are prioritized over less promising leads. For example, information on hot leads may be sent to sales department for immediate follow up. In this example, warm leads are less promising than hot leads and are sent to a nurturing program and eventually either become hot leads or cold leads based on whether the prospects take part in further activities and based on their level of participation in those activities. In this example, cold leads are people who are not interested in the marketer's product or service and hence their information is not sent to sales department.
While such scoring of leads can be extremely valuable, it is also generally very burdensome on the marketers since scores are assigned according to the lead scoring rules defined by the marketer manually. For example, the marketer has to decide whether attending a trade show organized by the marketer is worth 6 point, 7 points, or some other number of points to create a lead scoring rule for that activity. The marketer creates the lead scoring rule by assigning such a score to each activity based on his experience and gut feelings. There can be hundreds or thousands of activities, and making a scoring rule for each of these activities can be extremely cumbersome, burdensome, and complex job for the marketer. Further, the marketer is assigning the score for each scoring rule based on his experience and without the benefit of empirical data. These gut feeling scoring assignments have little or no relationship to actual conversion and rejections of the lead and thus may not result in the best leads being generated, which will result in loss of time and money. Additionally, these manually-assigned scores are also static once they are created and thus fail to account for changes in the significance of activities to conversions and rejections over time.